検索キーワード： 著者 "Peter Kriger" すべてのカテゴリー

In January 1920 the United States did something no large industrial nation had attempted. It took a commodity that half the country drank and roughly a third of the federal budget depended on, and it withdrew the law from it.We have been telling the story ever since as a costume drama. The...

Jeder kennt das Ende des Mittelalters. Das Schießpulver hielt Einzug, der gepanzerte Reiter wurde zum Museumsstück, Burgen fielen, der Feudalismus brach zusammen, und die moderne Welt brach durch die entstandene Lücke ein. Es ist eine wunderbare Geschichte. Doch fast nichts davon hat den...

Todos lo admitieron al mismo tiempo. Internet entero levantó la vista de su teléfono y confesó que sí , que piensa constantemente en el Imperio Romano. Lo convertimos en una broma, porque así solemos hacer con las cosas que nos asustan un poco. Pero la broma escondía un secreto, y el secreto es este: no podemos dejar de pensar en Roma porque, en realidad, nunca la abandonamos. Este libro se toma el meme en serio sin tomarse en serio a sí mismo. Argumenta algo genuinamente extraño y genuinamente cierto: que Roma no colapsó tanto como migró.

When Hernan Cortes brought down an empire of millions with a few hundred men, he let a secret out of the bag that we have been trying to forget ever since. A civilization is astonishingly easy to knock over. And almost nobody has to die for it to happen. Peter Kriger takes up mischievous satire Anti-Columbus, the one in which the Aztecs sail east and discover Europe, and chases the joke all the way to its unsettling, oddly liberating end. His argument is simple and hard to unhear: a civilization is a shop window.

In the summer of 1789, a bankrupt kingdom attempted the most ambitious upgrade in the history of government. Within four years the upgrade had eaten its own engineers, and a machine designed to guarantee the rights of man was signing death warrants at a rate that required printed forms with...

Un roi barbare a mis Rome à sac en 410, et quinze siècles plus tard, on en accuse encore des adolescents. Ils l'ignorent. D'ailleurs, les bâtisseurs de cathédrales, les auteurs de romans d'horreur et les ingénieurs qui programment aujourd'hui des machines dans des salles obscures...

Viajando desde Roma y Atenas hasta las montañas de hierro de China, los talleres de Bagdad, los altos hornos de la India y los caminos sin ruedas de América, este libro desmantela el cómodo cuento de hadas del progreso y plantea una pregunta que resulta ser tan relevante para nosotros como para ellas.

For eight hundred years, everything needed to print a book already existed. China was printing whole libraries from carved blocks in the ninth century. Korea was casting metal type before Gutenberg was born. Rome had the alphabet, the screw press, and the art of striking a hard punch into soft metal to make identical objects by the thousand. And nothing happened. Then, in a middling German river town, a bankrupt goldsmith with a talent for lawsuits put the pieces together, and within seventy years the unity of Western Christendom was gone.

The Elector of Saxony owned five thousand holy bones, and he had them printed in a catalogue with illustrations, because a collection nobody can browse is a wasted asset. Eight years later his own university professor published a list of complaints about precisely this line of business. The Elector protected him for the rest of his life and never agreed with a word he said. That is the Reformation in one household, and it is not the version most of us were taught. The usual version has a brave man, a hammer, a door, and the birth of the modern mind.

Everyone knows the story. A Christian empire sold narcotics to a civilization that did not want them, and when that civilization objected, the empire sent warships. It is the most morally convenient episode in the Western canon, which is exactly why it deserves to be handled with suspicion. This book takes the case for the defense seriously, and builds it as strongly as the evidence allows. China grew far more opium than it ever imported. The officials enforcing prohibition were often the same men profiting from its failure.

In 1830, respectable physicians warned that the human body would come apart at thirty miles an hour. In 1889, a Boston paper explained that the telephone would end visiting, conversation, and eventually friendship. In 1954, the United States Senate spent three days investigating comic books. Every one of these fears was sincere, well-argued, and signed by people with credentials. And nobody today can feel a single one of them. That is the strange thing this book is about. We have not merely stopped fearing trains, wires, and ringing objects in the hallway.

Every age is certain its witches are real. The old world had servants of the Devil; later centuries had wreckers, subversives, and enemies of the people; we have our own quiet vocabulary for the ones we agree to destroy. This book argues that beneath these changing costumes lies a single machine—old, patient, and unnervingly consistent—that any frightened community can assemble from the same few parts and set running almost by reflex. Traveling from the purification rituals of the ancient world to the accusation storms of the internet, Peter Kriger takes that machine apart piece by piece.

Tout le monde l'a admis en même temps. Internet tout entier a levé les yeux de son téléphone et a avoué que oui , en effet, il pensait constamment à l'Empire romain. On en a fait une blague, comme on le fait souvent avec ce qui nous fait un peu peur. Mais cette blague cachait un secret : on ne peut s'empêcher de penser à Rome parce qu'on ne l'a jamais vraiment quittée. Ce livre prend le phénomène au sérieux sans se prendre lui-même au sérieux. Il défend une idée à la fois étrange et vraie: Rome ne s'est pas effondrée, elle a migré.

The First World War is usually explained by asking what people wanted. Historians have spent a century sorting the guilty from the merely reckless, and the argument has produced magnificent scholarship without producing agreement. This book asks a different question.

In 2007 a man published a book about the future. He held no chair in futurology, ran no consultancy, and had no institutional reason to be believed. He looked at the world, concluded that he could see where it was heading, and printed his conclusions with his name and the year on the cover, which is more than most forecasters have the nerve to do.

Five thousand years ago, somebody poured a season's worth of grain into a shared building and immediately ran into a problem that has never once gone away: who gave what, and who gets it back? The answer was to write it down. That small, unheroic act—the receipt—set loose nearly everything we now call civilization. To keep the receipts, people invented writing. To carve up the fields that fed the shared pile, they invented working numbers. And to move wealth across time, from a fat year into a lean one, they invented the loan, with its patient, compounding appetite.

Christopher Columbus set out to end the world. He said so in writing, at length, with scriptural citations. He believed his voyages had been foretold by the prophets. He believed the gold of the Indies would finance the recovery of Jerusalem, without which the last act of history could not begin.

Nobody ever needed it. For the whole of human existence before the sixteenth century, our species got along on honey, fruit, and the occasional raided hive, and no one recorded the deprivation. Then, in the space of a few generations, a substance with no nutritional argument in its favor became the single most valuable commodity crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and the largest forced migration in recorded history was organized to supply it. The crop was not cotton. It was dessert.

We talk about privacy the way we talk about clean air: as something we once had in abundance and are now carelessly using up. The historical record tells a stranger story. For most of the human past there were no corridors, no locks worth the name, no envelopes, no curtains, and no expectation whatsoever that a person might pass an evening unobserved. Privacy was not stolen from our ancestors. It was built, slowly and expensively, out of chimneys, plaster, cheap glass, sealing wax, and a set of manners that taught people to pretend they had not heard.

Alle gaben es gleichzeitig zu. Das ganze Internet blickte von seinen Handys auf und gestand: Ja , tatsächlich denkt es ständig an das Römische Reich. Wir machten einen Witz daraus, denn so gehen wir mit Dingen um, die uns ein wenig Angst machen. Doch der Witz barg ein Geheimnis, und dieses Geheimnis lautet: Wir können nicht aufhören, an Rom zu denken, weil wir es nie wirklich verlassen haben. Dieses Buch nimmt das Meme ernst, ohne sich selbst dabei ernst zu nehmen.